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Significant (Little) Moments Pulled From Obscurity

A glass of wine had just arrived when Colum McCann, who won the National Book Award for fiction last week with “Let the Great World Spin,” leaned forward with a story to tell.

He was 9, and his father had taken Mr. McCann, then growing up in suburban Dublin, to visit his ailing grandfather in a nursing home in London. It was the first — and as it turns out the last — time that he met his grandfather. Afterward, his father took him to a Hard Rock Cafe for a hamburger. When the waitress, herself also Irish, learned what had brought them to town, she stroked the young boy’s cheek and brought him an ice cream sundae.

“I know, for a fact, that if she’s still around, she would not remember that,” said Mr. McCann, now 44 and speaking with a strong Irish lilt despite having lived in New York for 15 years. “But every single time I touch down in London, I can feel that woman’s presence, and also her generosity. So this tiny little moment affected me in all sorts of extraordinary ways.”

All sorts of tiny and extraordinary moments make up “Let the Great World Spin,” a polyphonic novel set in 1970s New York that also works as an allegory about resilience and recovery after Sept. 11, 2001.

In one scene a group of prostitutes dances around an old man in a wheelchair whom they have rolled into the back of a fruit-and-vegetable truck, giving him a birthday to remember. An 18-year-old computer hacker falls in love with the voice of a legal librarian, whom he hears talking on a pay phone. A radical Irish monk hangs a spoon off his nose to impress a Guatemalan nurse and her children. A white judge apologizes for being rude to a working-class African-American woman who visits his wife at their Park Avenue apartment.

“I think about all these small little moments, and I think they are really important,” said Mr. McCann, sitting in a booth in a corner of Harry’s Steak in downtown Manhattan, a successor to a restaurant that appears in the novel. (That restaurant’s owner, Harry Poulakakos, said at least 50 people had told him that they had read about him in the book.)

The novel’s multiple story lines revolve around a big and extraordinary moment: the daredevil walk between the twin towers by a tightrope artist in 1974. (The character, based on Philippe Petit, remains unnamed in the novel.)

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Colum McCann's latest book is the award-winning “Let the Great World Spin.”Credit
Librado Romero/The New York Times

But for Mr. McCann, it is what happened thousands of feet below that high wire that intrigues him more. The tightrope walker’s “act of bravura,” he said, is at least equaled by the “human bravura” of the people on the street. His characters know grief, disillusionment and rank failure. And yet they go on.

With close-cropped hair and a neatly trimmed beard, Mr. McCann has the hale good looks of a rugby player and the convivial charm of someone who enjoys lifting a glass with a wide circle of friends.

But he also has the earnest writing teacher’s habit of spouting off inspirational quotes from the likes of Roland Barthes and Joseph Brodsky. His favorite, from Samuel Beckett: “No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”

Although he has spent years on the literary festival circuit and teaches creative writing at Hunter College, Mr. McCann has not yet achieved true stardom. Like many critically admired authors, he has not tended to sell many books: his last novel, “Zoli,” about a Romany singer in Eastern Europe, sold 5,000 copies in hardcover and another 5,000 in paperback, according to Nielsen BookScan, which tracks about 70 percent of retail sales.

“Let the Great World Spin” could be his breakout. It has sold 22,000 copies in hardcover, and his publisher, Random House, has printed 100,000 copies of the paperback, which will be released on Dec. 4. In addition to the National Book Award, it has garnered widespread praise. Writing in The New York Times Book Review, Jonathan Mahler described it as “one of the most electric, profound novels I have read in years.”

Mr. McCann, the second youngest of five children, grew up in suburban Dublin. At 21, Mr. McCann, who had studied journalism, moved to America. “I was going to write the great Irish-American novel,” he said.

He bought an old typewriter and a scroll of paper — modeling himself on Jack Kerouac — but never managed to type more than a page and a half.

So he took off on a bicycle for a year-and-a-half odyssey across the United States, traveling through Florida, Louisiana, Texas, New Mexico, Utah, Wyoming and the Pacific Northwest, dipping into Mexico and finishing in San Francisco. Along the way people would confide intimate stories. “In a strange way they would become novelists,” he said.

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Colum McCann accepted this year's National Book Award for fiction at a ceremony last week. Credit
Michael Appleton for The New York Times

Mr. McCann said he has fed off those stories ever since, if only in what it taught him about listening to other voices.

He meticulously researches and studiously avoids writing anything that resembles his own life. His novels have burrowed into a disparate cast of characters: the “sandhogs” who dug the tunnels of New York and the homeless people who later lived in them, in “This Side of Brightness”; Rudolf Nureyev, the Russian émigré ballet dancer, in “Dancer”; and the Romany poet and singer of “Zoli.”

He said he often wrote about people living grittier lives than he had ever experienced. “You know certain people keep themselves awake by cutting themselves and sprinkling salt in their wounds?” he said. “Part of it possibly is the desire to stay awake in the real world and to know how lucky I am and to realize that other people’s lives are not as good as mine.”

Curiously, he said, the most criticism he ever received for inhabiting other voices was for “Everything in This Country Must,” a collection about Ireland’s sectarian conflict. “Because I was born in Dublin, a number of people said ‘How dare you write about Northern Ireland?’ ” he recalled.

Mr. McCann drew “Let the Great World Spin” from multiple kernels. Several years ago he read an essay about Mr. Petit by Paul Auster. Then, the Sept. 11 attacks were viscerally brought home when his father-in-law, working in the south tower of the World Trade Center, escaped and walked uptown, arriving covered in ashes at the apartment of Mr. McCann and his wife, Allison.

Mr. McCann always knew he wanted to write obliquely about Sept. 11, using Mr. Petit’s walk as a leitmotif. But as he spun out his story of interconnected lives, he did not map it out.

“Mostly it was written on a wing and a prayer, not being entirely aware of what was going on or why it was going on,” he said.

He researched the history of 1970s New York in the New York Public Library, and the writer Richard Price introduced Mr. McCann to a police detective who took him on tours of the city. He also talked to computer hackers, older graffiti taggers and a judge to help make several of the novel’s characters accurate.

Much of the book is heartbreaking, but it is leavened by moments of redemption. Mr. McCann, who said he preferred to be known as a romantic rather than a sentimentalist, said he would always defend the notion of hope. “I would stand up and go bare knuckle for that,” he said.

A version of this article appears in print on November 28, 2009, on page C1 of the New York edition with the headline: Significant (Little) Moments Pulled From Obscurity. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe